To liven things up I decided to designate a book of the month well, each month, and to choose a book of the quarter each quarter, starting right now. As I surveyed the books reviewed this month I found an immediate problem: there’s more than one book I really, really loved this month. So I will take liberties in this first writeup and talk about several books. If the problem occurs again next month I’ll move to books of the month rather than just one. With that, here we go for May.
My top recommendations are:
- Waiting for the Apocalypse, a hilarious and tragic memoir of a fundamentalist Catholic family in the 70s, in an out of the San Francisco Bay area.
- The Thing about Life is that One Day You’ll be Dead, a clever and intriguing mix of family memoir and facts and thoughts about aging, also with many Bay Area references.
And I must mention three more books I enjoyed very much:
- Closing Time, a memoir that could be a great novel of growing up poor (and Catholic) with an alcoholic father in Philadelphia
- Flannery, a biography of Flannery O’Connor that (there’s a theme here) reads like a memoir… of a very Catholic writer.
- Q&A, the immensely funny novel from which Slumdog Millionaire, so a novel in the form of a memoir!
Enjoy!
FT's Books 